Using air photos and wartime newspapers, Ukrainian writer MICHAEL NIKIFORUK attacks a few myths about a wartime atrocity.
What if anything, happened at a place called Babi Yar (Old Woman's Ravine) near Kiev, Ukraine - September 29, 1941? According to official histories and inscriptions on monuments, 250,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis there. But if thousands of Kievan Jews (those not evacuated by the Soviets) were killed in September of 1941 by the Germans, they were not murdered or buried at Babi Yar. This fact was revealed in aerial reconnaissance photos discovered in the U.S. National Archives in Washington, DC.
In February 1997 a Ukrainian court threw out a case brought by Ukrainian Jews against V. Kretytnychy of the St. Andrew Society and E. Musiyenko, editor of the Kiev Evening News (Vechirnyi Kyiv), who challenged the official Babi Yar story. Encouraged by the court decision, on March 19, 1997 the Kiev Evening News published a four-page story setting the record straight for the first time since the Allies condemned the phony "atrocity" during World War II.
What is now coming to the fore is incontrovertible proof that no massacre took place at Babi Yar during the German occupation of Kiev; that the ravine was not used as a mass grave for Jews killed by the Germans. But it was a burial field between 1922-1935 for the victims of the Cheka/NKVD.
For decades, aerial photography has been recognized as an indispensable archaeological tool. With sophisticated equipment, ruins of ancient cities and cemeteries that lie under cultivated fields, forgotten for decades or centuries, have been discovered. Even submerged Hellenic ports have been discovered by aerial photography.
In 1991, wartime aerial photographs from the National Archives in Washington, DC were used as the ultimate guidance in exhumations of hundreds of Polish officers and intellectuals massacred in 1939-40 by the Soviet NKVD in the vicinity of Kharkiv. Aerial photos of Kiev's distant suburbs, including Bykivnia, Bilhorodka and Darnista, revealed mass graves of victims of the 1930's Stalinist terror-famine. It is therefore logical to assume that aerial photos of a ravine would reveal evidence of recent mass graves or of a major topographic disturbance.
The US National Archives in Washington contain about 1,100,000 wartime aerial photos, among them some 600 of Kiev, including Babi Yar. They were taken during 20 or more flights over the area. The first photos, taken at 12:23 pm on May 17, 1939, reveal such details as cars and even the shadows of the lamp posts on the streets of Kiev. Every large bush and small tree is visible on the slopes and at the bottom of the Babi Yar ravine. The last aerial photo coverage of Kiev (and Babi Yar) took place on June 18, 1944, about nine months after the city's "liberation" by the Red Army.
This series of reconnaissance photos demonstrates that the flora and the ground cover of the ravine remained undisturbed throughout the two years of German occupation. When the early and late photos are compared, it is obvious that the scattered trees grew and became slightly larger. No evidence of human or large animal activity in the ravine can be discerned on the many aerial photos of Babi Yar taken repeatedly in different seasons of the years 1939-1944.
In November of 1943, a group of Western journalists, including New York Times correspondent William "Bill" Lawrence, himself Jewish, were invited to Kiev by the Soviets. This occurred two weeks after the city's fall to the Red Army. The reporters were told that this was only six weeks after the Germans had completed the dynamiting, disinterment and open-air cremation of 70,000 corpses, followed by the crushing and bulldozing of the unburned bones into the soil of the ravine.
But the Western journalists were hard pressed to find any convincing physical evidence at the site of the alleged massacre.
The lack of reliable physical evidence of this "greatest massacre of World War II" - and the inability to find a single inhabitant of Kiev willing to corroborate the story - impelled the NKVD to provide the Westerners with three "eyewitnesses." Even though a Times editor censored out the most egregious exaggerations (about Soviet partisans and German "gassing vans"), the disjointed story by these three liberated Soviet POW's became the template for imitation for all subsequent Babi Yar testimonies.
When one realizes that all liberated Soviet POW's were facing either a firing squad or a short-lived future in the Gulags (it was a capital crime in the USSR for a soldier to be captured alive by the enemy), one realizes why it was easy for the NKVD to coerce any expedient statement from them.

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews